*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.

*Unboxing the original screen used T1000 glitch hand. Filmed at home on a blue formica kitchen table using an iPhone5s. Also in shot: Ansell Super Gloves Large and a Wiltshire Professional stainless inox blunt knife

- No More Bullshit: James Cameron Runs From Threat of Bio Attack, Economic Collapse

ANGLE ON ITS HAND as it touches a railing in passing. The railing is covered with O.S.H.A. yellow-and-black safety tape. The hand turns yellow and black, the color fading to normal by about the elbow. It rips the hand from the railing with difficulty.

-TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY revised final shooting script

Deleted from the original version, Terminator 2’s hand glitch scene was reinserted into the later Collector’s Edition, bestowing the prop with the enviable trait of being ‘screen used’. The hand-as-object evaporates, recorded as a series of photons passing through a camera lens and colliding with a filmic surface. The artifact disappears into a series of digital frames and at precisely that moment obtains the possibility for far more power and prestige, solidified by cinematic or special edition inclusion. It is now canon, part of the Terminator metaverse.

Cut and spliced, graded, enlarged and isolated, the unpredicted possibilities latent within this new hand image-object are a microcosm of T2’s unforeseen future, a dystopic tomorrow determined by an outlier. Technology becomes terrifying precisely due to its adaptability. Indeed, much of the tension in the film’s early scenes derives from the effortless overpowering of old-guard machine by next-generation mutating intelligence—the violent dethroning of bounded technology by its boundless successor.

The original T-800 terminator is modeled after an ideal man, a modern-day Adonis. Played by former body-builder Schwarzenegger, the robot is endowed with bulging biceps and rippling pectorals, deriving his power from these muscular structures working in tandem with a steel endoskeleton. The T-800 possesses superhuman strength, but it is only superhuman. Based on notions such as the cyborg and the posthuman, technology here is seen as an augmentation of properties already present in the somatic, an array of enhancements which extend our skills and senses. Despite a discourse which longs for sci-fi fantasies and a future Singularity, this is a vision bounded materially by the epidermis and cognitively by the Anthropocene’s horizon of possibility. The posthuman remains an inherently fleshy idea—the computer inserted subcutaneously into the carnal.

By contrast, the T-1000 conforms to the svelte frame of actor Robert Patrick. With narrow shoulders and a generic crew cut, this Terminator spends much of the film dressed in a police uniform, discarding the rugged individualism of Schwarzenegger’s biker attire for a sterile everyman image. Instead, the T-1000 derives power from plasticity. Its innovative material makeup is a difference-in-kind, a wholly other substance which allows it to shapeshift on command. If the T-800 is a crude supersoldier ripping open car doors, the T-1000 (literally) embodies a wider spectrum of control, mutating into knife-like structures when needed but also imitating the bodily forms of past victims or metamorphosizing into glistening puddles.

This is an entity which can become anybody, but more potently can become no-body. Rather than mimicking the makeup and mindset of the human, this model is able to leverage a broad array of alternative logics and employ disparate forms of non-anthropocentric agency. Of course the film arc places humanity’s survival front and center, but the radical disinterestedness with the human form exhibited by this artificial intelligence embraces Benjamin Bratton’s assertion that “thinking is much more diverse, even alien, than our own particular case.”1 Bypassing the ‘bionic man’ trope, this image of an infinitely mutable technology is much closer to our current device-agnostic digital landscape, one which achieves a contiguous colonisation of everyday experiences via a constellation of screens, protocols and processes.

Yet despite these fantasies of digital immateriality and myths of totalising technology, the hand retains its thing-ness. Cast in rubber from the actor’s own body and spraypainted yellow, this is a thing which has been molded and manipulated, stored and shipped. As the artist even notes, “There are glue stains on the palm surrounding a stigmata-like puncture - a steel rod protrudes out from the wrist where the puppeteers controlled it.”2 While famed for its early use of CGI, T2 only features about 3.5 minutes of computer generated imagery in comparison to 300 practical effects.3 By detaching the hand from the spectacle of the silver screen and its overwhelming aura, Clemens simultaneously deflates a set of cybernetic dreams.

The hand becomes vestigial. The prop is now useless. Instead, the object enters a purpose-purgatory - severed from its role in commercial image production but also lacking the characteristics necessary for everyday utility. Here it joins the ranks of other objects by the artist: a fibre-optic broom gathering data from a fake sweeping session (Total Internal Reflection), pinballs which cycle endlessly on a spiral track (Pinball Lanterns), and a painstakingly recreated viewing bridge which offers no viewing (Collector’s Edition Glitch at Adam Art Gallery). Form and function are decoupled; the object becomes out-of-place and its new artistic instrumentalization is often related to the hole it leaves behind.

At the film’s climax, the T-1000 becomes materially imbalanced, leading to the three glitch scenes. The antagonist becomes an anti-Midas, a metallic form which takes on the properties of everything he touches. Possession of the hand temporarily transfers from robot to railing, a shift unconsciously picked up by film sites which label this scene as the “O.S.H.A. hand glitch”.4 The line between subject and object becomes blurry; the membrane between ‘being other than’ and ‘being part of’ is burst.

Clemens also leverages this kind of entanglement, but his practice is not simply one of script writing or prop-production for speculative films. Rather, like the mercurial T-1000 itself, his appropriations and recombinations start to unflatten the screen, teasing out the collapsed layers into distinctive strands: film as commercial enterprise, as cultural narrative, as collectors commodity. Clemens’ low-tech assemblages and personal performances allow him to set up new relationships within this expanded field, exploring connections to other films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, brands like Monster energy drink, or childhood memories at Universal Studios. His “unauthorised” interventions draw on the power of cinema as a communal cultural language but also destabilise it, rewriting a read-only surface; a hybrid Clemens-Krueger kayaks along Auckland's waterfront, an unboxing video of a Hollywood collectible is interspersed with tui5 calls. Like the wounded T-1000, these unstable entities draw from a mixture of objects and architectures, becoming reanimated alloys which twitch and glitch.